Obscurantism in the Fukushima Nuclear Accident and a Neologism-Proof Equilibrium

During the Fukushima nuclear accident, the government informed people that
something bad was happening but provided little information as to exactly how bad it was.
Obscurantism refers to such a phenomena, which has been observed in different forms many times in the history. In order to explain obscurantism during the accident, we build a cheap talk game and characterize a neologism-proof perfect Bayesian Nash equilibrium. This paper demonstrates that bad information is withheld if the publics assessment on the governments capability in maintaining an orderly societyis too high and if the government places too much importance
on this assessment.